Daily Calendar

 

Daily calendar is an important part of our math spiraling and review. A new student leads calendar each week. We talk about the months, the days of the week, the number of days in school, and the daily weather. With the number of days in school, we use tally marks, straws, ten frames, and a hundreds chart to show different ways to make numbers. With weather, we look at things like cloud coverage and precipitation. We also check the daily temperature and graph it to see temperature changes over seasons.

Place Value Race

To help review place value concepts, we have been having short place value relay races. The class is divided into three groups and they sit in rows. I write three larger two-digit numbers on the board and the students compete to see who can describe the number in picture form (sticks and dots), standard notation, and expanded form. If they need help, they can ask their teammates. The team who finishes first correctly gets three points, second place gets two points, and third place gets one point.

Jeopardy!

Thank you to April Larremore, our district's Kinder/First Grade Strategist, for giving our class an electronic Jeopardy game. The students love it! We connected it to our Promethean Board thanks to the help of our Instructional Media Specialist, Sharon Thornton. The software that comes with the game is very easy to use and I was able to create several review games. My teammate, Ms. Branch, and I combined classes one afternoon during math to review various concepts. Each student had a dry-erase board to work out problems, as needed, and they took turns controlling the joysticks. They stayed engaged the entire time.

Student Created Books for Review

Several months back our first grade team brainstormed various ways we could help our students review concepts. One of the ways we came up with was to have the students create class books. The students create these books for all of the content areas.

For example, in science the students made books about force and motion, bodies of water, landforms, etc. My teammate typed up various phrases that included specific concepts and vocabulary in kid-friendly terms which the students glued in order and illustrated. In math, I laminated their pictures created from our shapes lesson (check them out here at The Shape of Things) and put them together as a book. I also laminated their Pumpkin Patch Place Value pictures and put them together as a book. They also made a place value book with specific vocabulary to show the different ways to build and model numbers as well as how to compare them from greatest to least and vice versa.

Also, I have taught the students how to export pictures in the computer lab from Pixie 2. We save these exported pictures and I print them front to back. They are then laminated and put together as books. Most of our computer lessons are based in math and rather than the work to just be stored in the computer, I like to print them.

For reading, we often make group Flow Maps to retell stories. During reading workshop, I divide the students into groups and each group takes a section of the Flow Map to retell that portion and illustrate it. This helps students remember what they have read and practice retelling stories.

We keep these books in a student-accessible bin and the students may choose to read them when they finish work early or during reading workshop. Because the students created them, they are very motivated to read them. Additionally, we read them as a whole group before district tests. Our district tests every three weeks or so, depending on the subject. This is good way to connect back to previously taught lessons and review specific vocabulary.